Venezuela’s economy has collapsed. The country is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, hospitals have run out of such basics as antibiotics and there have been food riots, though realistically there is scant food to riot over.
Saddest of all, cardboard is suddenly in short supply. It’s being used to make coffins for uncounted young children who are dying of starvation.
Yet this is a nation that sits on the second or third largest oil reserves in the world. It should be rolling in wealth.
Its leadership class are certainly making out like bandits. The current president, Nicolas Maduro, has an accrued net wealth estimated at about $2 million US. Not bad for a former bus driver, although peanuts compared to his predecessors (in fairness, he’s just getting started).
Before him, Hugo Chavez amassed a family fortune of more than $500 million, much of it stolen. Prior to that, president Carlos Andrés Pérez embezzled 250 million bolivars. That was back when the country’s currency was worth something. Today, the bolivar trades at just over 10 cents Canadian and is falling like a rock.
An earlier president spent $10 million in public funds paving the road to his house. Another fled the country in such a rush, he left a suitcase filled with $2 million US sitting on an airport runway.
All of which raises two questions. First, where is the United Nations when you need it? The answer, sadly, is nowhere. You’re not going to get anywhere trying to reason with Venezuela’s kleptocrats. All you can do is toss them out.
But when the world body was established in 1945, member countries renounced the authority to use military force against rogue regimes.
That choice was made, in part, because the League of Nations, which preceded the UN, did contemplate the possibility of armed interventions to maintain international order. But the power was never used, and the UN abandoned it. Yet if the world body, its hands tied by a self-denying charter, is impotent to act, what good is it?
Of course, there are valuable humanitarian programs carried out by various subgroups, such as UNESCO. But Venezuela illustrates the uselessness of the UN where its influence is most needed (North Korea, Syria, Somalia and Iran also come to mind.)
It’s true the UN’s member countries can impose economic sanctions. Unfortunately, these prove ineffectual when dealing with corrupt leaders of the Venezuelan variety. All you accomplish is further impoverishing the population.
Look at North Korea, where sanctions have failed to dissuade Kim Jong-un from pursuing nuclear weapons. His countrymen are starving, but Kim’s net worth is estimated at $5 billion. What does he care if people have to eat grass to survive?
Second, how can we explain the sustained and rampant corruption that has persisted in Venezuela throughout most of its history? Part of the problem is the historical role played by the continent’s two main colonial powers, Spain and Portugal.
You can argue that some empire-building nations, among them Britain, France and the Netherlands, at least attempted to export elements of democracy to the lands they occupied. (How successfully is another matter.)
But Spain and Portugal never tried. They viewed their captive territories as principally a source of loot. They were there to plunder, not to do good works.
In reality, what’s happening in Venezuela is a shame on us all. Despite the many brave words we speak about world order, we don’t really mean it.
Faced with massive poverty, corruption and starving infants, we avert our eyes and offer meaningless prayers to some higher power.
But we are, collectively, that higher power. We just won’t take the steps to prove it.
